The quick hit

Jennifer Lawrence pulls audiences into Katniss Everdeen's quandaries and director Francis Lawrence builds suspense through cunning shifts of character in this spiffy second chapter of the trilogy.

Grade: A-

Just how much of a feminist heroine is Katniss Everdeen? Let’s just say that in the course of “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire,” she literalizes Hillary Clinton’s accomplishment of making 18 million cracks in a glass ceiling. Katniss, a country girl who’s adept at bringing down game with her archery, isn’t ideological or programmatic. She simply doesn’t want anyone telling her what to think and feel or how to live.

Her battle-hardened purity is the reason she can win support in all the districts of a post-apocalyptic plutocracy called Panem, including the decadent Capitol, where citizens embrace her as a passionate, incendiary celebrity. If there’s one thing Katniss can’t stand, it’s friends and allies withholding information. In “Catching Fire,” good people like her grizzled, funky mentor Haymitch Abernathy (Woody Harrelson) do it only to protect her – and because they trust she’ll do the right thing anyway.

At the climax of “The Hunger Games,” Katniss pretended that she loved Peeta, the male contestant from their Appalachia-like District 12. She signaled that she would rather commit suicide with him than kill him, prompting authorities to proclaim them the Hunger Games’ first joint winners. In “Catching Fire” – the second, vastly superior film to come from novelist Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy – Katniss faces the consequences of breaking the rules of the Games.

Near the start, President Snow (Donald Sutherland) demands that Katniss and Peeta persuade their countrymen that they really are romantic lovers – or be killed with their families. For a girl who thinks her true love is rugged coalminer and hunter Gale Hawthorne (Liam Hemsworth) rather than personable baker’s son Peeta, that pressure proves dizzying enough.

Katniss soon learns that the oppressed people of the districts see through her charade and cheer it on as an act of defiance against the Capitol. She’s the target of an evil government, a symbol of righteous revolt, and, for most of the movie, a mystery to herself.

With the bulk of the action outside the arena, the challenge for this deft, compressed adaptation is to pull you into Katniss’ struggle for grace under pressure. With Jennifer Lawrence, the filmmakers have the right gal for the job.

Rather than play an inchoate personality as someone pallid and wishy-washy, Lawrence puts a precise, vivid sheen on each facet of Katniss’ developing awareness. Of course, she’s bracingly alert on the hunt. She’s equally thrilling when, in a moment of shattering, street-wise disdain, Katniss confronts the Hunger Games’ designers with their legacy of carnage. Lawrence achieves her own kind of rooted regality as Katniss blooms into a revolutionary icon.

Like Katniss, Lawrence turns out to be a splendid team player. She brings out the best in the actors who play the men in her life. Harrelson is alternately hilarious and electrifying as Haymitch, a soused, nutty uncle figure who comes off crazy like a fox. Hemsworth wears his big-lug allure lightly, and doesn’t overplay his suffering. Hutcherson brings Peeta boyish energy and manly dignity; he calls Katniss out for looking at him as if he’s wounded, then blames himself for acting like he’s wounded. You can see why Katniss’ amorous impulses are a jumble.

The director, Francis Lawrence (no relation), conjures a credibly frightening future, and he does it the old-fashioned way, by building detail upon detail. The camera shakes less and takes in more of the landscape than it did in the first film. You better understand the districts’ separate functions. The depiction of District 11 as a sprawling latter-day plantation is particularly evocative – and chilling.

Stanley Tucci is now actually funny instead of air-quotes “funny” as the Games’ host, Caesar Flickerman. The actor is wonderfully amusing when this not-so-mighty Caesar confronts unruly life invading the artificial life of his TV program.

Elizabeth Banks brings some off-kilter humanity to Effie Trinket, Katniss and Peeta’s fashion-crazed escort. She remains a dithery fashion plate, all pouffy dresses and outré wigs, but she’s now touching as well as risible. This featherbrain has a heart: She exhibits exemplary group loyalty. She gives each representative of District 12 something golden, like Katniss’ mockingjay pin. These gifts help create a profound surprise during the games.

In the story’s turning point, President Snow, unconvinced by Katniss’ romantic act and agitated by her growing popularity, re-crafts the Hunger Games for its 75th edition. It will be a contest more like “Top Chef Masters” or an all-star year of “Dancing With the Stars.” The list of male and female competitors and mentors are drawn from surviving victors – so it’s inevitable that Katniss will fight again. Haymitch gets called to compete, but Peeta volunteers to take his place. It’s as if they’ve been called up on a stop- loss. (Haymitch will once more be on hand to guide them.)

Because the competitors are veterans rather than mostly untested kids, they emphasize strategy and teamwork rather than individual might and bravado. Instead of the panic-driven horror shows of the first movie, director Lawrence manages to create textured, multifaceted chases and battles, varying them to suit a host of supporting scene-stealers.

Jena Malone is superbly feisty as Johanna Mason, an axe wielding Amazon from the timberlands of District 7, and Jeffrey Wright and Amanda Plummer kindle eccentric chemistry as brainiacs from the technological industries of District 3. Watching over all of them is Plutarch Heavensbee, the new Head Gamemaker, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman with his inimitable air of tension rippling beneath calm. No actor is better at promising revelations to come.

The timing for this movie couldn’t be better. Liberals should embrace its condemnation of elites who view society as their rumpus room. Conservatives will argue that it warns against the tendency of central governments to become tyrannical. Everyone will connect to its vision of a surveillance society spiraling out of control.

Movie lovers should applaud this sequel for improving on the best parts of the original. What “Catching Fire” really ignites is the power of imagination.

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